Open Access

ARTICLE

Development of Mobile App to Support the Mobility of Visually Impaired People

R. Meenakshi¹, R. Ponnusamy^1,*, Saleh Alghamdi², Osama Ibrahim Khalaf³, Youseef Alotaibi⁴

1 Center for Artificial Intelligence & Research, Chennai Institute of Technology, Kundrathur, 600069, India
2 Department of Information Technology, College of Computers and Information Technology, Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia
3 Al-Nahrain Nano-Renewable Energy Research Center, Al-Nahrain University, Baghdad, Iraq
4 Department of Computer Science, College of Computer and Information Systems, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia

* Corresponding Author: R. Ponnusamy. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2022, 73(2), 3473-3495. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2022.028540

Received 12 February 2022; Accepted 19 April 2022; Issue published 16 June 2022

Abstract

In 2017, it was estimated that the number of persons of all ages visually affected would be two hundred and eighty-five million, of which thirty-nine million are blind. There are several innovative technical solutions available to facilitate the movement of these people. The next big challenge for technical people is to give cost-effective solutions. One of the challenges for people with visual impairments is navigating safely, recognizing obstacles, and moving freely between locations in unfamiliar environments. A new mobile application solution is developed, and the application can be installed in android mobile. The application will visualize the environment with portable cameras and persons with visual impairment directly to the environment. The designed system mainly uses the YOLO3 program to identify and locate the distance between the objects and the camera. Furthermore, it determines the direction of the object. Finally, the system will give the voice command to teach/inform the visually impaired people to navigate the environment. It is a novel work at the global level. The proposed approach is cost-effective and affordable to all strata of society.

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Keywords

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